The present invention relates generally to advertising of goods and services. Advertising takes many forms, such as in newspapers, radio, television, billboards, signage such as “For Sale” signs. Moreover, in today's electronic world, advertising is provided over the internet, through hand-held devices (such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), email devices like the Blackberry™, and other wireless handhelds) supporting text messaging, e-mail, faxing and web browsing, and through cellular phones. However, all such advertising has varying limitations due to price, space, and time, depending on the particular advertising medium. For example, a “For Sale” sign posted on an automobile has very limited space for listing information regarding the details of the automobile. In addition, passersby may have only a brief moment to observe the sign. The time constraint issue is often a problem for radio, television and other signage advertising. This presents two problems: (1) the advertisement itself cannot confer all the information desired; and (2) the consumer cannot memorize or take down all the information being provided so that the consumer can evaluate the subject matter being advertised and also contact the seller.
Several methods of solving these problems with advertising have been previously utilized and/or disclosed. The simplest form has been to provide a telephone number at which a potential customer can call the seller to inquire about the subject matter being advertised. However, this method presents several drawbacks. For one, many consumers are hesitant to speak to sellers directly for a number of reasons, such as the desire to avoid pushy salesmen, or because the consumer prefers to remain anonymous while gathering information about a good or service. Furthermore, telephone numbers are relatively long strings of numbers which can be difficult to remember or to jot down. The consumer may not have a writing instrument and paper handy, or she may be driving.
In the era of the internet, advertisers now can include a website address in their advertising so that the consumer can access additional information regarding the good or service and the seller's contact information through the website. However, this type of advertising requires the advertiser to create and maintain a website. This can be an expensive and time-consuming proposition, especially for sellers who are only selling a single item, such as their used automobile, or only a limited number of items.
To avoid each seller having to develop their own website, numerous businesses and methods have been developed to aggregate seller's advertising on a single website. This allows each seller to simply develop their own web page advertising (which can be as simple as filling in the desired information on a web-based form from the particular website), which is then posted on the advertising website. Ebay™ is one well-known example of such a website. The advertising website typically provides a searching feature which allows the customer to search for the seller's product based on various criteria such as the seller's name, type of product, brand name, price, etc. On-line classified advertising operates in much the same way. But this type of system does not address the problem of allowing the seller to easily direct potential customers to their on-line advertisements through the seller's own advertising, such as physical signs or other media advertisements like newspaper, radio or television. For instance, if the seller puts a For Sale sign on his automobile with the website address, the seller must still perform a search on the advertising website and then determine which advertisement is the one of interest.
In order to take advantage of the economic efficiencies of aggregated advertisement websites like Ebay™ and on-online classified ads, but also allow more direct access to a particular ad of interest, several methods of advertising utilizing unique advertiser codes have been disclosed. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,853,979, issued to Bass (hereinafter referred to as the “Bass patent”), discloses a method of marketing goods and services in which a physical For Sale sign includes a unique alphanumeric identifier and the website address of the common advertising website. The seller posts advertising information on the website and the website associates the advertising information with the unique alphanumeric identifier. A potential customer can then access the on-line advertisement associated with the sign by logging onto the common advertising website and entering the unique alphanumeric identifier. The Bass patent further discloses that the unique alphanumeric identifier is a sequence of numbers, letter, or numbers and letters, preferably at least 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 characters in length.
Similar to the Bass patent, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2002/0087420, to Higgins et al. (the “Higgins application”), and U.S. Pat. No. 6,898,571, to Val et al. (the “Val et al. patent”), also disclose methods of advertising utilizing a common advertising website and a unique identification code. The Higgins et al. application only discloses that the code can be a telephone number or other character string. The Val et al. patent discloses that the identification code is a unique alpha-numeric code.
Although the method disclosed in the Bass patent contemplates that the unique identifier can be as few as 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 characters, making the identifier relatively easy to remember, strings of such a limited number of characters does not allow for very many unique alphanumeric codes. For instance, for a four character string consisting of two letters, followed by two numbers, there are only 67,600 unique strings. And for a five character string consisting of two letters, followed by three numbers, there are only 676,000 unique strings. Considering that EBay™ has literally millions of listings at any one time, this may not be enough listings to provide a short, easy to remember, unique identifier for each advertising listing.
Accordingly, there is a need for an improved system and method of advertising using an electronically accessible identification code which utilizes a short, easy to remember code and a common advertising database.